But I was only beginning to gauge the unaccountable elements in
Beatrice. For a week after my return to Lady Grove I had no sign of
her, and then she called with Lady Osprey and brought a huge bunch of
perennial sunflowers and Michaelmas daisies, “just the old flowers
there were in your room,” said my aunt, with a relentless eye on me. I
didn’t get any talk alone with Beatrice then, and she took occasion to
tell us she was going to London for some indefinite number of weeks. I
couldn’t even pledge her to write to me, and when she did it was a
brief, enigmatical, friendly letter with not a word of the reality
between us.
I wrote back a love letter—my first love letter—and she made no reply
for eight days. Then came a scrawl: “I can’t write letters. Wait till
we can talk. Are you better?”
I think the reader would be amused if he could see the papers on my
desk as I write all this, the mangled and disfigured pages, the
experimental arrangements of notes, the sheets of suggestions balanced
in constellations, the blottesque intellectual battlegrounds over which
I have been fighting. I find this account of my relations to Beatrice
quite the most difficult part of my story to write. I happen to be a
very objective-minded person, I forget my moods, and this was so much
an affair of moods. And even such moods and emotions as I recall are
very difficult to convey. To me it is about as difficult as describing
a taste or a scent.
Then the objective story is made up of little things that are difficult
to set in a proper order. And love in an hysterical passion, now high,
now low, now exalted, and now intensely physical. No one has ever yet
dared to tell a love story completely, its alternations, its comings
and goings, its debased moments, its hate. The love stories we tell,
tell only the net consequence, the ruling effect....
How can I rescue from the past now the mystical quality of Beatrice; my
intense longing for her; the overwhelming, irrational, formless desire?
How can I explain how intimately that worship mingled with a high,
impatient resolve to make her mine, to take her by strength and
courage, to do my loving in a violent heroic manner? And then the
doubts, the puzzled arrest at the fact of her fluctuations, at her
refusal to marry me, at the fact that even when at last she returned to
Bedley Corner she seemed to evade me?
That exasperated me and perplexed me beyond measure.
I felt that it was treachery. I thought of every conceivable
explanation, and the most exalted and romantic confidence in her did
not simply alternate, but mingled with the basest misgivings.
And into the tangle of memories comes the figure of Carnaby, coming out
slowly from the background to a position of significance, as an
influence, as a predominant strand in the nets that kept us apart, as a
rival. What were the forces that pulled her away from me when it was so
clearly manifest she loved me? Did she think of marrying him? Had I
invaded some long-planned scheme? It was evident he did not like me,
that in some way I spoilt the world for him. She returned to Bedley
Corner, and for some weeks she was flitting about me, and never once
could I have talk with her alone. When she came to my sheds Carnaby was
always with her, jealously observant. (Why the devil couldn’t she send
him about his business?) The days slipped by and my anger gathered.
All this mingles with the making of Lord Roberts β. I had resolved upon
that one night as I lay awake at Bedley Corner; I got it planned out
before the bandages were off my face. I conceived this second navigable
balloon in a grandiose manner. It was to be a second Lord Roberts α,
only more so; it was to be three times as big, large enough to carry
three men, and it was to be an altogether triumphant vindication of my
claims upon the air. The framework was to be hollow like a bird’s
bones, airtight, and the air pumped in or out, and the weight of fuel I
carried changed. I talked much and boasted to Cothope—whom I suspected
of scepticisms about this new type—of what it would do, and it
progressed—slowly. It progressed slowly because I was restless and
uncertain. At times I would go away to London to snatch some chance of
seeing Beatrice there, at times nothing but a day of gliding and hard
and dangerous exercise would satisfy me. And now in the newspapers, in
conversation, in everything about me, arose a new invader of my mental
states. Something was happening to the great schemes of my uncle’s
affairs; people were beginning to doubt, to question. It was the first
quiver of his tremendous insecurity, the first wobble of that gigantic
credit top he had kept spinning so long.
There were comings and goings, November and December slipped by. I had
two unsatisfactory meetings with Beatrice, meetings that had no
privacy—in which we said things of the sort that need atmosphere,
baldly and furtively. I wrote to her several times and she wrote back
notes that I would sometimes respond to altogether, sometimes condemn
as insincere evasions. “You don’t understand. I can’t just now explain.
Be patient with me. Leave things a little while to me.” She wrote.
I would talk aloud to these notes and wrangle over them in my
workroom—while the plans of Lord Roberts β waited.
“You don’t give me a chance!” I would say. “Why don’t you let me know
the secret? That’s what I’m for—to settle difficulties! to tell
difficulties to!”
And at last I could hold out no longer against these accumulating
pressures.
I took an arrogant, outrageous line that left her no loopholes; I
behaved as though we were living in a melodrama.
“You must come and talk to me,” I wrote, “or I will come and take you.
I want you—and the time runs away.”
We met in a ride in the upper plantations. It must have been early in
January, for there was snow on the ground and on the branches of the
trees. We walked to and fro for an hour or more, and from the first I
pitched the key high in romance and made understandings impossible. It
was our worst time together. I boasted like an actor, and she, I know
not why, was tired and spiritless.
Now I think over that talk in the light of all that has happened since,
I can imagine how she came to me full of a human appeal I was too
foolish to let her make. I don’t know. I confess I have never
completely understood Beatrice. I confess I am still perplexed at many
things she said and did. That afternoon, anyhow, I was impossible. I
posed and scolded. I was—I said it—for “taking the Universe by the
throat!”
“If it was only that,” she said, but though I heard, I did not heed
her.
At last she gave way to me and talked no more. Instead she looked at
me—as a thing beyond her controlling, but none the less
interesting—much as she had looked at me from behind the skirts of Lady
Drew in the Warren when we were children together.
Once even I thought she smiled faintly.
“What are the difficulties” I cried, “there’s no difficulty I will not
overcome for you! Do your people think I’m no equal for you? Who says
it? My dear, tell me to win a title! I’ll do it in five years!...
“Here am I just grown a man at the sight of you. I have wanted
something to fight for. Let me fight for you!...
“I’m rich without intending it. Let me mean it, give me an honourable
excuse for it, and I’ll put all this rotten old Warren of England at
your feet!”
I said such things as that. I write them down here in all their
resounding base pride. I said these empty and foolish things, and they
are part of me. Why should I still cling to pride and be ashamed? I
shouted her down.